Metaphors and Modalities: How Children Project Polar Adjectives onto Diverse Domains

GARDNER, HOWARD. Metaphors and Modalities: How Children Project Polar Adjectives onto Diverse Domains. CILD DEVELOPMENT, 1974, 45, 84-91. The capacity to appreciate and produce metaphoric language is thought to develop at adolescence. Yet metaphors are frequently noted in the speech of preschool children. To resolve this apparent contradiction, a test that probed metaphoric capacity was devised. Matched groups of subjects ranging in age from 31/ to 19 were required to indicate knowledge of the literal meanings of antonymous word pairs and then to project these terms onto domains where they applied only in a metaphoric way. Though there was improvement with age, preschool children demonstrated considerable ability at this task; the order of difficulty of words and domains were regular across age, except for an isolated difficulty displayed by the preschool children in projecting words onto swatches of color; reasons for matches differ markedly across ages. Whether metaphoric capacity is attributed to children appears to depend upon whether the ability to select acceptable metaphors or an explicit awareness of the rationale for the metaphor is the criterion. Both the distinction between an operative skill and an awareness of its existence and the preconditions for metaphoric competence are discussed.